In order to obtain my Computer Science degree (with a minor in Artificial Intelligence) I constructed an Artificial Ants' Colony Framework to solve optimization problems. My work was both on the field of Software Engineer and Artificial Intelligence. Specifically, I worked with the mathematical model derived from the behavior of ants' colonies in search of food. The behavior exhibited by Ants well display an interesting kind of self-organisation model, which can be useful to solve optimization problems, e.g., find the shortest path in a graph. In 2010, my work was selected to be part of the Scientific Conference at my Alma Matter UCV. You can check out the conference website.

The main idea was to enhance a plain ACO algorithm (see here and here), by providing each ant with genetic information that it uses together with stigmergic information to construct solutions to a path in a maze. What I wanted to test was whether or not individual memory (genetic information) would enhance or hinder the collective behavior of the colony. It turns out that in average it improves the performance of the algorithm!

If you want to read more about the algorithm, a genetic framework constructed for this project, experiments, etc; you can either download the original paper here EvolvingAntsEnriqueAreyan.pdf or read the online version here.

If you want to test the algorithm yourself or perhaps improve it, see the download section below.

GlobalWebTek is a Venezuelan based company born in 2003 whose mission is to help other companies in the creation of effective e-business strategies so that they can potentiate the way they do business online.

Esto Es Web.com, is a company I founded back in 2008 in Caracas, Venezuela, specialized in the conceptualization, development and marketing of MiWeb, a software for medium and small-sized companies that enables to quickly and easily have a useful presence on the web. I built this software as a result of my previous years of experience in web development, from 2003 to 2008. I wanted my customers to be able to update their corporate or personal websites easily, with the resulting HTML and meta information being as clean and search friendly as possible.

Abstract

Access to many born-digital materials can only be accomplished economically through the use of emulation where contemporaneous software is executed on an emulated machine. For example, many thousands of CD-ROMs have been published containing proprietary software that cannot be reasonably recreated. While emulation is proven technology and is widely used to run both current and obsolete versions of Windows and Unix operating systems, it suffers a fatal flaw as a preservation strategy by requiring future users to be facile with today's operating systems and software.

We have previously advocated assisted emulation as a strategy to alleviate this shortcoming. With assisted emulation, a preserved object is stored along with scripts designed to control a legacy software environment and access to the object enabled through a helper application. In this paper we significantly extend this work by examining, for a large data set, both the cost of creating such scripts and the common problems that these scripts must resolve.